Lately, it’s been troubling me that if I physically wanted to find my dead grandmother—who died in 1992—I couldn’t. There is something vain in the way I flatter my own memory, which is ultimately undeserving of praise. I was in sixth grade when she died, and the way my recollection of her is slipping, you’d think I was 6. Plus, it’s not like we don’t speak of the woman.

For my family, she had that whole deity-on-earth Sun King thing going on—except Jewish and feisty and she never ruled France. Still: I should know where she is.

Even when she was alive, it was difficult for me to locate her. For one thing, she was a small woman. For another, we were emotionally close but neither of us had a driver’s license, and that put a damper on things. She lived in places I had never been: a street named after a broom on the Lower East Side, then Brooklyn, then Queens. Then, at some point during my toddlerhood, she moved to a condominium complex in Mamaroneck. As a preteen, I’d plot running away from home to live with her.

I went through a phase when I was convinced I could walk anywhere. So she’d help me figure out exactly how I could walk to, say, Japan. In trips to her house, I’d stare out the back window of my parents’ car, trying to determine how I’d walk to grandmother’s house if I had to. But there were no appealing bridges or romantic woods—just split-levels and an A&P and a few not-so-foot-traffic-friendly highways.

For my father’s birthday this year, I decided to take some literal steps closer to my grandmother. With the help of Google and MapQuest, I took the No. 7 train out to the last possible stop in Queens. Then I waited for a bus. The bus took me three stops deeper into the borough, at which point I was the only passenger. I got out and walked a few blocks to Stork’s, a German bakery on 150th Street. It wasn’t my grandmother’s graveyard, but more than once I had heard her say she wanted to go there when she died.

Technically, my father grew up in Brooklyn, but my grandmother was living in Whitestone, Queens, by the time I was born. So with the exception of my father’s affinity for egg creams and the Dodgers, I associate that side of my family with the wrong borough.

As expected, the bakery seemed smaller and slightly less magical as an adult. But it smelled exactly the same. I placed an order for bear claws and rainbow cookies and thin strips of homemade chocolate creepily dubbed “cats’ tongues.” These were treated like gold bullion when we were kids, and I was pleased to see that Stork’s still produced them. While I waited, a German woman with a thinning blond bun, her forehead covered with so many wrinkles it was concave, pushed through a swinging door. She shouted in German at someone in the kitchen behind her. I had my order in hand and my back turned when I heard “Wait!” She came out from behind the rounded glass counter, spun me around, squeezed my face and said: “How is your grandmother?”

“She’s …. ”

The German woman beamed, still molding cheeks into a fish face.

“ … good. She’s great,” I said.

For Dad’s birthday brunch in Manhattan that weekend, I whipped out the paper bag with the Stork’s logo—so familiar, it took everyone at the table a few seconds to realize how long it had been since they’d seen it. My father beamed and bit into a bear claw. But then his face loosened and he said: “Wait a minute. What time did you go out there?”

“I don’t know—Thursday?” I thought perhaps he was questioning the freshness of the claw.

“At night?”

My father comes from a generation when New York neighborhoods grew worse and worse. I come from a generation where New York neighborhoods get better and better. (“Better” meaning a gentrified population of yuppies, hipsters and overpriced boutiques, which in some languages translates to “tragic.”) Still, I started to realize the importance of keeping in touch with the physical memory of things.

My desire to visit my grandmother’s grave was now affixed to my “to-do” list. But I didn’t want it to be one of those things that gets carried over to the next list and the next: Your whole life can be transformed into one sprawling long-division problem if you’re not careful. I asked my parents the name of my grandmother’s cemetery, stripping my tone of any suggestion that I actually planned on visiting. It’s not that I didn’t want to go with my family, riding in the back seat again, putting rocks on grandma’s grave and telling her what we’ve been up to this decade. I wanted to do that at some point, but I hadn’t seen the woman in 15 years and I needed my alone time. Furthermore, I needed it on the way there and back.

Long Island: I am sorry to report that my grandmother is buried in a cemetery in Lindenhurst, Long Island. The cemetery has a Web site. Well, ain’t technology grand! Who else in your life will lead you to marzipan cookies and help you find your dead grandmother? One problem: No No. 7 train. No buses. I needed a car.

That’s when I saw a “layout” tab on the main menu. I clicked on it to find what looked like a blueprint of the cemetery, with misshapen squares and paths running through them like seams on a quilt. With this, I was meant to find my loved one’s “lot.” Seeing the map immediately brightened my fading memory. I smiled and put my fingertip through a haze of monitor static to touch lot 6.

I had found her, but now what? I hadn’t thought past this moment. I could take the train to Lindenhurst, but then what? Would a cab wait? Would it drop me off and then I’d have to find some sort of main house to get the number for another? What if cabs don’t go to cemeteries? It’s probably an unwritten cabbie rule: no picking up people outside of Sutton Place (bad tippers + vomit) and no graveyards.

And if the cabbie did agree, would the pressure of a meter running and a driver waiting sully the purity of my communication with the dead? I guess I would tell her how much I miss her, but it doesn’t take especially long to tell someone that. She probably wouldn’t approve of me coming in the winter, anyway. If she were alive, she might lovingly smack me in the back of my head, asking me what I was thinking, coming all the way out here without gloves.

I still want to go, but now that I’ve found her, it seems a far better idea to take the train out in the spring. Everything will be thawed and blooming and cheerful again. And, worst-case scenario, I can walk home if I have to.

It was 1999, and I stood on the Charles Bridge and went to one of Kafka’s houses and drank the coffee and the beer (both of which were better over there, truly). And I thought it would cure me of my obsession with the movie Kicking & Screaming, Noah Baumbach’s first film, released in 1995. I thought I would be vaccinated in the truest sense—given a gluttony of the very thing I hoped to avoid. It didn’t work.

When the Criterion Collection released the film on DVD last year, I tried again. I watched it over and over. In the end, all it got me was my VCR in the trash. The VHS-only version of Kicking & Screaming was the only reason I had held onto it for so long.

I wish there were something or someone—an empiricist philosopher, a great short novelist—that I quoted more. But it’s a movie that permeates my conversations. And I’m not alone. In fact, I would be remiss in continuing here without mentioning Matt Feeney’s 2005 piece for Slate, in which he used the release of The Squid and the Whale to herald Mr. Baumbach’s unapologetically emotional early work (Mr. Jealousy and Kicking and Screaming). The difference, I suspect, between Mr. Feeney and myself is that I’m pretty sure he leads a functional life. I can barely make it though a week without referencing baked potatoes and TV weathermen.

First, let me explain the Prague thing. “Oh, I’ve been … ” is one of the more heavily quoted lines in this cult film, dropped at a college graduation party in which Jane (Olivia d’Abo) breaks up with her boyfriend, fellow aspiring writer Grover (Josh Hamilton). Jane is the one who goes off to Prague (“Division One Bratislava,” mind you), but the line belongs to Grover—who has, of course, never been. He is left to sort out the perils of post-graduation life with his friends. One of them re-enrolls in college; another lives with his mother and gets a job at Video Planet. If a “plot” is the driving force behind a sequence of events, Kicking and Screaming doesn’t have much of an engine. At one point, Grover’s friend Max (Chris Eigeman) says, on a stroll across campus: “I caught myself writing ‘Go to bed’ and ‘Wake up’ in my date book as if they were two separate events.” That’s pretty much the whole scene.

But it’s not the whole story; Kicking and Screaming extends far beyond the screen for me. I owe it a debt of thanks for some of my great relationships—two friendships, two romances. As long as you graduated from college, the movie is easy to mine for insights that might otherwise take multiple dates to stumble upon. If I’m lucky enough to find someone who loves the film as much as I do, it acts as a kind of shorthand. One of these people just bought me a bag of black-eyed peas for my birthday. This was touching. On the other hand, I once gathered a small group of friends to watch the movie; no one was in the mood to concentrate on nuanced dialogue, and they talked through the whole thing. I no longer speak to these people.

Actually, everyone has a movie or two that they feel this way toward, or should. So what makes Kicking and Screaming so cultish? It’s conceivable, when watching even the most precious of our precious movies—The Royal Tenenbaums, Garden State, Little Miss Sunshine—to skate along the surface of things, to revel in the randomness throughout and the hope provided at the end. Kicking and Screaming, however, is mercilessly melancholy. Basically, it feels real. It’s also unlike the much-loved Whit Stillman films that it’s more closely related to (Barcelona, Metropolitan, The Last Days of Disco) in that it’s relentlessly fixated on minutiae. There’s always something extraordinarily average to incorporate into one’s daily life.

This is a film which taught me how to return beer if there’s food in it. How to parallel-park. How to show up drunk to therapy. How to sleep with a freshman. It unwittingly holds the answers to a lot of life’s little questions just at it claims to have none. Career: “What I used to pass off as just another bad summer could now potentially turn into a bad life.” Extracurricular activities: “Perhaps we should disband the club now before feelings get hurt.” Book reviewing: “The scene with the carrot peeler really resonated.” Sex: “I’d like to fuck her on the tennis court, if you get my meaning.” Racial relations and/or inept figures of speech: “Racism spans from here to the dance floor!” Parental relations: “Isn’t it bad enough to be whipped by your own mother, you have to have this wussy relationship with Grover’s?” Staying in for the night: “I’m nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday. I’ve begun reminiscing events before they even occur. I’m reminiscing this right now. I can’t go to the bar because I’ve already looked back at it in my memory and I didn’t have a good time.”

The Web site Overheard in New York arguably owes its existence to Kicking and Screaming. In fact, the first real line of the movie takes place at the graduation party, when someone practically off-camera says, “I think violence is always justified some of the time.” The closest I ever got to something that good was walking up Sixth Avenue past St. Vincent’s one night: “And I said, ‘I don’t know what that thing is, but it’s not touching my head unless you unplug it.’”

I still plan on holding onto my VHS version of Kicking and Screaming. I’m not exactly sure why, but the uncertainty seems in line with the themes of the movie.

I had another small viewing party when the DVD came out—this time at my apartment and for a carefully chosen audience. Because you can literally see more of the movie on the new edition, it changes slightly. In one scene on the VHS edition, there’s a poster in the background with half a cookie on it. There is writing beneath the cookie, but it’s been impossible to read for over a decade. If this was Napoleon Dynamite, it might have said: “Cookies Are Awesome.” If this was Lost in Translation, it might have said: “Be Happy.” In Kicking and Screaming, it reads: “Pro-Life?”

On the new DVD edition, there’s an interview that Mr. Baumbach does with Mr. Eigeman, who speaks of having dinner at a restaurant when some fan slips him a note that says “Broken Glass,” a joke from the movie. But the actor diagnoses this experience positively: He sees it not as the odd behavior of a clinging fan, but as a subtle tip of the hat to an old project that still has a lot of meaning for a lot of people. I was relieved. He could have easily gone in the other direction. After all, it’s bad enough that I’m whipped by my own life, now I have to have this wussy relationship with theirs as well.

I end up feeling like the new guy at a 250-person A.A. meeting. “First trip to Mexico City?” a stranger says. I nod. “Oh boy,” he says, as if I have so far to go and so much to learn before I get there.

This happened to a somewhat extreme degree on a recent weekend trip from New York to L.A. The plane, or “tin enema of the sky,” becomes a biopsy of bicoastal culture—a tour of the consequences of manifest destiny carried out in a paced timeframe, like the monorail at the zoo. Except the wildlife is on the inside.

This is nothing new: L.A. passengers are superficial and networky; New York passengers are grumpy and odd. The phrase “Some things are cliché for a reason” is itself a cliché. But for a reason.

New York to L.A.:

I arrive early to buy airport-sanctioned water at the gate and sit in a chair that affords me a nice view of Anderson Cooper on the TV. A plane has crashed somewhere in China. Footage is shown. I look around to see if anyone else is noticing this and discover my first sign of L.A.-ness: No one’s watching CNN. I start unwrapping a granola bar and hear a male voice over my shoulder: “I can’t believe you’re eating candy in the morning.”

“So judgmental,” I scoff, and hold the granola bar over my head. If this was a New Yorker they might leave it at that, but this was someone from the Sunshine Species.

“You’re lucky you’re still young and can do that.”

I turn around to see a man in his early something—40’s? 50’s? He has a face that some people might call leathery, though I personally would not buy a handbag upholstered with his cheeks. He wore a button-down shirt in need of some buttoning, and I could sooner finish counting the stars than count all the teeth in his mouth. I turn away again.

“When you’re my age, it goes straight to your thighs.”

What straight New York man refers to his thighs? One of us was definitely born and bred west of Nevada.

“Well, it’s not like flexibility,” I crane my neck. “I’m pretty sure you can eat candy bars when you’re old. Er, older. Besides, it’s not candy.” I piece the wrapping together from where I’ve ripped it to demonstrate. Only in California are solids considered junk food.

“First trip to L.A.?”

Oh Christ. This is the same insulting feeling I get walking past Columbus Circle when men with maps ask me if I’d like a bike tour of Central Park. No, I most certainly would not.

“Nope.” I turn around again, but spy something in my peripheral vision and nearly give myself a paper cut in the cornea turning my head. It’s his business card.

“Take it,” he says. “I do voiceovers.” Then what’s with the headshot? I think.

A flight attendant announces that we will have to throw away all liquids now. Always the problem child, I approach the gate to affirm that this is the water they sold to me—not some explosive terrorist shit from a bubbling stream in Maine. Normally I wouldn’t bother, but I have special swallowing needs during takeoff on account of an unfortunate past incident involving some (literally) deafening pain, a Glaswegian emergency room and a squirrel syringe. I cannot live on gum alone.

Apparently, I will have to throw away this water as well. An elfin teenager behind me steps forward, presumably in my defense. She takes the same pleading tone but uses it to describe something called a “power cleanse.” It’s a three-day minimum diet in which you only “eat” lemon-flavored water with organic maple syrup. She holds up a plastic bottle that looks like it’s filled with piss.

“If I don’t have my power cleanse, I’ll pass out. This is, like, my sole source of nutrition for this flight.”

To her credit, she’s on Day 2 of this. The attendant ignores both of us and disappears behind a metal door. The girl sits down in a huff and looks for sympathizers, which she quickly finds.

L.A. to New York:

“Oh, thank God you’re not fat.” This from the woman who has already settled next to me—in our emergency-exit row! Score! Let’s laugh! We’ve got awesome legroom!

“Thank God!” I laugh back. She is about my age, maybe a little older, beautiful and dressed head to toe in gray. Gray glasses, gray dress, gray ankle boots, gray skin. We chuckle together until I realize that her seat is being pushed forward ever so slightly by an enormously obese man. The man and I lock eyes, a look broken only by me slinking down into my seat.

Does the woman proceed to ask me if this is my first time visiting New York? Does she want to know why I was in L.A.? No. “So what do you do?” she asks, digging through the marsupial pouch of magazines in front of her.

“I—”

“Fuck!” She presses and holds the “assistance” button long after it’s lit. She must be the life of the elevator bank. The stewardess comes over. “I don’t have a sleeping mask.”

“We don’t have them anymore, Miss.”

“Well, can you see if you can find one? Or a rubber band and some napkins, for all I care?”

“Let me check,” the flight attendant smiles and looks over at me, “and I’ll be back before takeoff with your water.”

My companion grips our shared armrest and lurches her head back in a jealous spasm. “I have inner ear—” I say.

“Sure, sure. And sorry! I interrupted you. Where do you live again?”

“I have to use the bathroom.” I unbuckle my seatbelt.

I am waiting behind a man who looks and acts like Woody Allen if Woody Allen were, upon closer examination, a woman of 82. She is that rare combination of an instant, low and constant talker. She is also phobic.

“At my age, you’re too old to hover. It’s the knees. And the flushing—forget about it. That noisy blue water makes me feel like I’m gonna get sucked into Hell. It makes me hold onto my jewelry. If I dropped my rings, God forbid. And there’s no room to pick anything up in there without smashing your skull! Not that anyone should have to use the bathroom anyhow. It’s not like they hydrate or feed you anymore. They’d sooner see you starve then spend a lousy—what could it be, 30 cents?—on a pack of peanuts. Or crackers, if people have those allergies.”

“You’ll be home soon enough,” I say. “In the meantime, can I offer you a granola bar?”

Actually, I can pinpoint the origins of this last one. I came by the information in 1988, during the reading-comprehension section of a standardized test. I don’t remember why it makes you hotter. I assume it has something to do with the energy expended during digestion. I didn’t do especially well on the test. I also stopped eating ice cream.

This wasn’t a great sacrifice. I come from a long line of lactose-intolerant Eastern European Jews, and keeping ice cream in the house was a bit like stockpiling blowfish. I don’t crave ice cream, largely because you can’t crave what you don’t understand. Always one to mine ice cream for gobs of cookie dough and brownies, I’ve never really liked the stuff. Frozen cream. Why? Sugar I can get behind, but that’s cheating. I’d eat balsa wood if you battered it in sugar.

The existence of Tasti D-Lite alone holds a special fascination for me, as it seems ludicrous to go out of your way to make a low-cal empire out of what amounts to a coffee condiment. But even I have to respect Tasti. It’s a real part of the city, and it speaks to that miraculous sliver of New York that overlaps L.A.: the vain. Low-cal, nonfat, late-night, after-gym vanity. And vanity we can all get behind. Plus, Tastis have that hole-in-the-wall neon quality, those scribbled-in flavors of the day, their own fro-yo Nazis grudgingly giving out samples. Whether you like ice cream or not (and with the exception of judicious doses of really good mint chocolate chip, I don’t), Tasti is what happens when a small-town treat meets big-city psychology.

But since April, that psychology has shifted toward the former. Like those fun facts we all know, it’s hard to pinpoint how a sudden acceptance of cellulite-inducing ice cream came to be. Which came first: the collective change in views toward fattening desserts and rainbow sprinkles, or the opening of purveyors pushing fattening deserts and rainbow sprinkles? The ice-cream juggernaut or the ice-cream marketing? It’s tough to say. All I know is that I had never heard of Cold Stone Creamery until this spring.

One day I looked around, and Cold Stone was chocolate-covered and hygienic and everywhere. Ben & Jerry’s we accepted because it spoke to that sliver of New York that overlaps Burlington: pot smokers. But Cold Stone (which I inverted to “Stone Cold” for a month before someone corrected me) is a cheery thing of the Southwest—the blurry-aired, turquoise-speckled region of this great nation’s belly. A place that should know better than anyone that ice cream makes you hotter.

Alas, ’tis the season for frozen confection, and last week after dinner with friends, I walked straight past a Tasti and was pulled into a Cold Stone Creamery on 72nd Street. As if the Time Warner Center wasn’t enough to suck me back into suburbia, only a few blocks up Cold Stone reeked of familiarity. It was well lit and had shiny tables and professional photographs of women enjoying ice cream free of irony and sexual innuendo. Cold Stone sells perfectly wholesome, thigh-expanding treats to hardened New Yorkers. Toto, I thought, don’t sweat it—we’re still in Kansas.

As I perused the easy-to-read and graphically enhanced board of flavor options, my mind blanked. Without my glasses on, the flavors blurred (pineapple and Butterfinger? That can’t be right) and my stomach screamed. I tried to focus. The manager, who did not identify himself as such, came up behind my friends and me and started recommending flavor combinations. I nearly pepper-sprayed him.

We stared blankly at him for long enough that he finally offered a “This is my store” and grinned. This is my store. It was the kind of pride of ownership that you imagine every fast food chain dreams of when it hires people to run its franchises. My friends encouraged me to try the ice cream. As I attempted to find the flavor that had the least amount of actual cream in it, I couldn’t help but think that this kind of pressure would never happen at Tasti, a delightfully unfriendly institution that doesn’t lend itself to indulgence and is therefore easy to slough off if you want to. Reject a tennis-ball-capacity waffle cone full of cake batter and fudge and you may as well kick a puppy.

And that’s when the singing started. Every time you place a tip in the tip jar, the entire staff of the Creamery sings a handful of nonsensical ditties that sound as if they’ve been snatched from a straight-to-DVD Barney video. The staff is super-duper psyched about ice cream and they want you to know it. They are like a militia of sweetness Spartans, such is their near-oppressive shouting. Now I suppose this one act is vaguely New York, as it is reminiscent of the nail salons throughout the city in which everyone stops what they’re doing to say “hello” as you walk through the door.

But this tip ’n’ sing creates quite the dilemma, since you feel bad (for both you and them) by making them sing, so then you don’t tip and feel bad about that. In the end, I chose a small cup with candy-bar chunks—easy to free from their frozen prison of lactose. The woman who rang me up handed me my change and thanked me for coming. I dropped the coins into the jar as stealthily as I could.

I was baffled. Where do they find people on the island of Manhattan so dedicated to ice cream? The manager I can let slide, but where did the employees come from? Were they imported? I’m all for unexpected pockets of cheer in a bustling metropolis, but I just couldn’t muster the “I’ll have what they’re having” reaction I get when I see two people making out in Central Park or laughing hysterically on the F train. I don’t like to be made to feel uncomfortable if I’m not buying into sanctioned fun. If I wanted that, I’d find a senior prom in Arizona to go to. It’s only been a few months, but for me Cold Stone Creamery feels like the edible version of Orvis or Rockport. Someone has to frequent these places to keep them open, but they stick out no matter how prosperous they become.

Perhaps Cold Stone Creamery will eventually blend into its urban environs. For now, the place feels not so much a part of the city as a part of some Tales from the Crypt plot in which we revisit this scary, overly lit place in the light of day and find that it has vanished.

Actually, I can pinpoint the origins of this last one. I came by the information in 1988, during the reading-comprehension section of a standardized test. I don’t remember why it makes you hotter. I assume it has something to do with the energy expended during digestion. I didn’t do especially well on the test. I also stopped eating ice cream.

This wasn’t a great sacrifice. I come from a long line of lactose-intolerant Eastern European Jews, and keeping ice cream in the house was a bit like stockpiling blowfish. I don’t crave ice cream, largely because you can’t crave what you don’t understand. Always one to mine ice cream for gobs of cookie dough and brownies, I’ve never really liked the stuff. Frozen cream. Why? Sugar I can get behind, but that’s cheating. I’d eat balsa wood if you battered it in sugar.

The existence of Tasti D-Lite alone holds a special fascination for me, as it seems ludicrous to go out of your way to make a low-cal empire out of what amounts to a coffee condiment. But even I have to respect Tasti. It’s a real part of the city, and it speaks to that miraculous sliver of New York that overlaps L.A.: the vain. Low-cal, nonfat, late-night, after-gym vanity. And vanity we can all get behind. Plus, Tastis have that hole-in-the-wall neon quality, those scribbled-in flavors of the day, their own fro-yo Nazis grudgingly giving out samples. Whether you like ice cream or not (and with the exception of judicious doses of really good mint chocolate chip, I don’t), Tasti is what happens when a small-town treat meets big-city psychology.

But since April, that psychology has shifted toward the former. Like those fun facts we all know, it’s hard to pinpoint how a sudden acceptance of cellulite-inducing ice cream came to be. Which came first: the collective change in views toward fattening desserts and rainbow sprinkles, or the opening of purveyors pushing fattening deserts and rainbow sprinkles? The ice-cream juggernaut or the ice-cream marketing? It’s tough to say. All I know is that I had never heard of Cold Stone Creamery until this spring.

One day I looked around, and Cold Stone was chocolate-covered and hygienic and everywhere. Ben & Jerry’s we accepted because it spoke to that sliver of New York that overlaps Burlington: pot smokers. But Cold Stone (which I inverted to “Stone Cold” for a month before someone corrected me) is a cheery thing of the Southwest—the blurry-aired, turquoise-speckled region of this great nation’s belly. A place that should know better than anyone that ice cream makes you hotter.

Alas, ’tis the season for frozen confection, and last week after dinner with friends, I walked straight past a Tasti and was pulled into a Cold Stone Creamery on 72nd Street. As if the Time Warner Center wasn’t enough to suck me back into suburbia, only a few blocks up Cold Stone reeked of familiarity. It was well lit and had shiny tables and professional photographs of women enjoying ice cream free of irony and sexual innuendo. Cold Stone sells perfectly wholesome, thigh-expanding treats to hardened New Yorkers. Toto, I thought, don’t sweat it—we’re still in Kansas.

As I perused the easy-to-read and graphically enhanced board of flavor options, my mind blanked. Without my glasses on, the flavors blurred (pineapple and Butterfinger? That can’t be right) and my stomach screamed. I tried to focus. The manager, who did not identify himself as such, came up behind my friends and me and started recommending flavor combinations. I nearly pepper-sprayed him.

We stared blankly at him for long enough that he finally offered a “This is my store” and grinned. This is my store. It was the kind of pride of ownership that you imagine every fast food chain dreams of when it hires people to run its franchises. My friends encouraged me to try the ice cream. As I attempted to find the flavor that had the least amount of actual cream in it, I couldn’t help but think that this kind of pressure would never happen at Tasti, a delightfully unfriendly institution that doesn’t lend itself to indulgence and is therefore easy to slough off if you want to. Reject a tennis-ball-capacity waffle cone full of cake batter and fudge and you may as well kick a puppy.

And that’s when the singing started. Every time you place a tip in the tip jar, the entire staff of the Creamery sings a handful of nonsensical ditties that sound as if they’ve been snatched from a straight-to-DVD Barney video. The staff is super-duper psyched about ice cream and they want you to know it. They are like a militia of sweetness Spartans, such is their near-oppressive shouting. Now I suppose this one act is vaguely New York, as it is reminiscent of the nail salons throughout the city in which everyone stops what they’re doing to say “hello” as you walk through the door.

But this tip ’n’ sing creates quite the dilemma, since you feel bad (for both you and them) by making them sing, so then you don’t tip and feel bad about that. In the end, I chose a small cup with candy-bar chunks—easy to free from their frozen prison of lactose. The woman who rang me up handed me my change and thanked me for coming. I dropped the coins into the jar as stealthily as I could.

I was baffled. Where do they find people on the island of Manhattan so dedicated to ice cream? The manager I can let slide, but where did the employees come from? Were they imported? I’m all for unexpected pockets of cheer in a bustling metropolis, but I just couldn’t muster the “I’ll have what they’re having” reaction I get when I see two people making out in Central Park or laughing hysterically on the F train. I don’t like to be made to feel uncomfortable if I’m not buying into sanctioned fun. If I wanted that, I’d find a senior prom in Arizona to go to. It’s only been a few months, but for me Cold Stone Creamery feels like the edible version of Orvis or Rockport. Someone has to frequent these places to keep them open, but they stick out no matter how prosperous they become.

Perhaps Cold Stone Creamery will eventually blend into its urban environs. For now, the place feels not so much a part of the city as a part of some Tales from the Crypt plot in which we revisit this scary, overly lit place in the light of day and find that it has vanished.

Everyone has a right to a Saturday night, but—especially as summer approaches—please try to remember that you live on a very residential block, and when you start blaring the Killers, U2 and Kanye West on a constant loop from 2 p.m. to 5 a.m., it can make your neighbors want to throw things at you. And I have. Eggs, cream, cheap whiskey, sticks of gum, clumps of cat litter. Who knew a slotted scooper made such an excellent catapult? No pun intended. I’ve never hit anyone, of course. I usually wait until the party has adjourned inside and you’ve left the Counting Crows whining outside for my 6 a.m. listening enjoyment.

When you survey the damage in the noon-light of day, do you collapse into a fluorescent lawn chair and say, “Dude, things really flew off the hizzandle last night— someone brought cat litter!” I wish you would only look up. See that window framed in grape vines? It’s raining obscure food items, gentlemen, and I am the rainmaker.

The question these days is: Who owns Saturday night? More often than not, I tend to stay in on Saturday nights. I feel pretty good about this, having made enough of an inebriated buffoon out of myself on, say, Wednesday. For years now it’s been said: “Saturdays are for amateurs.” Sometimes I even try to get work done on Saturdays—so, boys, unless you intend on cutting me a check for a couple grand for every night I can’t hear myself think, please keep it down past 11 p.m. Yes, you’re that loud. Loud enough that I always regret, in the cold silence of Sunday, that I forgot to buy better earplugs. Loud enough that even huddled against one wall, I can’t escape the noise.

You see, I’m not even your neighbor, technically. We don’t have the same set of mailboxes. I live in the brownstone next-door, facing the back just like you. And I have my own crazy noisemakers to deal with: the fighting couple, the fighting couple’s make-up sex, the late-night redecorators. If it was traffic or construction or people on the street, I would be able to sleep through this madness. Those are the noises we all sign up for living in Manhattan, and I find them strangely soothing. But there is something rural about the noise you make. At first I wondered if I was being a noise snob. If you replaced Coldplay with Arcade Fire, Eminem with Ghostface Killah and Bud Light with Stella, would I be equally as annoyed?

I thought long and hard about this and decided: yes. Irritation knows no genre.

Last night, as I lay awake, my organs being vibrated by your speakers, I found myself imagining what the e-mail invitations for your gatherings look like. In my head, your subject line reads: “It’s that time of year again!” Your greeting: “Yo, peeps.” Your instructions: “We have three kegs, but it’s bring your own ice luge.” Your sign-off: “Feel free to bring friends, especially of the female persuasion. Peace out—and let the battle for the Beer Pong Champion of ’06 commence!”

Who doesn’t like an old-fashioned game of beer pong? I know I do. Getting that white ball in the last cup when you’re already piss-drunk makes you feel like you’ve mastered physics and phys ed all at once. But here’s the problem: The courtyard walls push sound upward, giving me and the rest of your neighbors the unique pleasure of being able to hear your party better than you can. It’s like being in a Bang and Olufsen store, except not fun. Sometimes you just don’t want to feel the music. This is the West Side, not Murray Hill, for Christ sakes—show some respect for yourself.

Unfortunately, the music is only half the battle. By some miraculously cruel feat of sound waves, I can hear not only the blaring bass of “Gangsta’s Paradise” but that ping-pong, pong-ping all night. Oh, and every conversation you have. Trevor, you and Mike were playing doubles with Ashley and Becca, and when you guys went in to get the Jager shots, Becca told Ashley that she’s been cheating on you for two months. With Mike. Do with this information what you will, but she seems pretty torn up about the whole thing, especially since Mike gave her herpes. If it was indeed him. Apparently there have been others. Anyway, Trevor, that’s about when you heard “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” screamed “Oh, hells yes!” and turned it up. So that’s all I got.

What’s funny about all this is that we’ve had this conversation before. You were probably too drunk to remember it. It was when you moved in about a year ago. On some idle Tuesday, you had a massive party and I had the flu. Around 2 a.m., I put on my winter coat and a pair of flip-flops and went out into the street. I followed the crowds funneling into your apartment like an Abercrombie clown car and asked to speak with whomever lived there. Trevor, that’s when you and I first met. Genial fellow, you slung your arm around me and offered me a beer. I coughed on you, said thanks but no thanks, and explained my predicament.

“I hate to be the asshole,” I sniffled.

“How ’bout this?” you offered, you ex-international-relations major you: “Party’s winding down …. ”

Just then, a man wearing only a Red Sox cap on one head and a powdered doughnut on the other came rushing past us.

“How about if it’s not dead by 6 a.m., you come back here and we’ll turn it down?”

“Listen to me”—I put my fists of used tissues on your shoulders—“I don’t even live in your building. That’s how loud you guys are.”

You were befuddled by this information and, instead of taking it as a sign of just how badly you were disturbing the peace, you said, “Oh, then what’s the problem?”

Oh, Trevor, what choice did I have? For some reason, at this particular party you had a basket of gold boxes containing chocolate outside your door. Without thinking, I swiped the basket and marched out. I flip-flopped up to the 72nd Street subway station and gave it to a homeless person. I saved a fistful of chocolates for myself, of course. I had intended to eat them, but I think it’s safe to say guilt comes more naturally to me than it does to you. Thus, I decided to recycle my spoils by opening my window once more. I threw them one by one into the abandoned plastic cups of beer on the ping-pong table. I think I may have actually gotten a few in. It thrilled me.

With that, guys in the garden apartment, let the battle for the Beer Pong Champion of ’06 commence! I’m off to buy milk and let it sour in my fridge.

Peace out,

Your Neighbor

Everyone has a right to a Saturday night, but—especially as summer approaches—please try to remember that you live on a very residential block, and when you start blaring the Killers, U2 and Kanye West on a constant loop from 2 p.m. to 5 a.m., it can make your neighbors want to throw things at you. And I have. Eggs, cream, cheap whiskey, sticks of gum, clumps of cat litter. Who knew a slotted scooper made such an excellent catapult? No pun intended. I’ve never hit anyone, of course. I usually wait until the party has adjourned inside and you’ve left the Counting Crows whining outside for my 6 a.m. listening enjoyment.

When you survey the damage in the noon-light of day, do you collapse into a fluorescent lawn chair and say, “Dude, things really flew off the hizzandle last night— someone brought cat litter!” I wish you would only look up. See that window framed in grape vines? It’s raining obscure food items, gentlemen, and I am the rainmaker.

The question these days is: Who owns Saturday night? More often than not, I tend to stay in on Saturday nights. I feel pretty good about this, having made enough of an inebriated buffoon out of myself on, say, Wednesday. For years now it’s been said: “Saturdays are for amateurs.” Sometimes I even try to get work done on Saturdays—so, boys, unless you intend on cutting me a check for a couple grand for every night I can’t hear myself think, please keep it down past 11 p.m. Yes, you’re that loud. Loud enough that I always regret, in the cold silence of Sunday, that I forgot to buy better earplugs. Loud enough that even huddled against one wall, I can’t escape the noise.

You see, I’m not even your neighbor, technically. We don’t have the same set of mailboxes. I live in the brownstone next-door, facing the back just like you. And I have my own crazy noisemakers to deal with: the fighting couple, the fighting couple’s make-up sex, the late-night redecorators. If it was traffic or construction or people on the street, I would be able to sleep through this madness. Those are the noises we all sign up for living in Manhattan, and I find them strangely soothing. But there is something rural about the noise you make. At first I wondered if I was being a noise snob. If you replaced Coldplay with Arcade Fire, Eminem with Ghostface Killah and Bud Light with Stella, would I be equally as annoyed?

I thought long and hard about this and decided: yes. Irritation knows no genre.

Last night, as I lay awake, my organs being vibrated by your speakers, I found myself imagining what the e-mail invitations for your gatherings look like. In my head, your subject line reads: “It’s that time of year again!” Your greeting: “Yo, peeps.” Your instructions: “We have three kegs, but it’s bring your own ice luge.” Your sign-off: “Feel free to bring friends, especially of the female persuasion. Peace out—and let the battle for the Beer Pong Champion of ’06 commence!”

Who doesn’t like an old-fashioned game of beer pong? I know I do. Getting that white ball in the last cup when you’re already piss-drunk makes you feel like you’ve mastered physics and phys ed all at once. But here’s the problem: The courtyard walls push sound upward, giving me and the rest of your neighbors the unique pleasure of being able to hear your party better than you can. It’s like being in a Bang and Olufsen store, except not fun. Sometimes you just don’t want to feel the music. This is the West Side, not Murray Hill, for Christ sakes—show some respect for yourself.

Unfortunately, the music is only half the battle. By some miraculously cruel feat of sound waves, I can hear not only the blaring bass of “Gangsta’s Paradise” but that ping-pong, pong-ping all night. Oh, and every conversation you have. Trevor, you and Mike were playing doubles with Ashley and Becca, and when you guys went in to get the Jager shots, Becca told Ashley that she’s been cheating on you for two months. With Mike. Do with this information what you will, but she seems pretty torn up about the whole thing, especially since Mike gave her herpes. If it was indeed him. Apparently there have been others. Anyway, Trevor, that’s about when you heard “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” screamed “Oh, hells yes!” and turned it up. So that’s all I got.

What’s funny about all this is that we’ve had this conversation before. You were probably too drunk to remember it. It was when you moved in about a year ago. On some idle Tuesday, you had a massive party and I had the flu. Around 2 a.m., I put on my winter coat and a pair of flip-flops and went out into the street. I followed the crowds funneling into your apartment like an Abercrombie clown car and asked to speak with whomever lived there. Trevor, that’s when you and I first met. Genial fellow, you slung your arm around me and offered me a beer. I coughed on you, said thanks but no thanks, and explained my predicament.

“I hate to be the asshole,” I sniffled.

“How ’bout this?” you offered, you ex-international-relations major you: “Party’s winding down …. ”

Just then, a man wearing only a Red Sox cap on one head and a powdered doughnut on the other came rushing past us.

“How about if it’s not dead by 6 a.m., you come back here and we’ll turn it down?”

“Listen to me”—I put my fists of used tissues on your shoulders—“I don’t even live in your building. That’s how loud you guys are.”

You were befuddled by this information and, instead of taking it as a sign of just how badly you were disturbing the peace, you said, “Oh, then what’s the problem?”

Oh, Trevor, what choice did I have? For some reason, at this particular party you had a basket of gold boxes containing chocolate outside your door. Without thinking, I swiped the basket and marched out. I flip-flopped up to the 72nd Street subway station and gave it to a homeless person. I saved a fistful of chocolates for myself, of course. I had intended to eat them, but I think it’s safe to say guilt comes more naturally to me than it does to you. Thus, I decided to recycle my spoils by opening my window once more. I threw them one by one into the abandoned plastic cups of beer on the ping-pong table. I think I may have actually gotten a few in. It thrilled me.

With that, guys in the garden apartment, let the battle for the Beer Pong Champion of ’06 commence! I’m off to buy milk and let it sour in my fridge.

Peace out,

Your Neighbor

“What? Yes.”

“The hollow bleeping sound when you type in your P.I.N., the one that sounds like Speak and Spell. That ain’t no Chase machine.”

“You’re psychotic.”

“No, I just live here.”

“O.K., that was cold.”

Over a year ago, my sister and her husband moved from their rent-controlled apartment on 24th and Lex to a squarish building with a mortgage payment called a “house” in Glen Ridge, N.J. They freakishly wanted more than one bedroom, and a lawn and a car. Even my mother, a Scarsdale-bred suburbanite herself, thinks they’re freaks.

I grew up a Grand Central girl. I’m finding it hard to acclimate to a West Side indoor strip mall of pizza and doughnuts and platform escalators. Just entering Penn Station has the tendency to make me feel like a little kid lost in a mall. To be fair, Grand Central has been known to have that effect on people as well. But I would imagine it’s more like being lost in a museum.

Not blessed with cultural or geographic personalities to defend, suburbanites can become fiercely loyal to and protective of the few things that differentiate theirs from other suburbs. I am no exception. Neither is my mother. I am boggled thinking about the place my sister left. My mother is boggled thinking about where she went.

“We have to accept it … she’s from Jersey now,” she mourns.

“Jesus, Mom—no, she’s not.”

“Yes,” she weeps uncontrollably in her black suit sewn from the cloth of betrayal, “she’s no longer with us.”

“What, so she’s against us?”

“No, I mean that in the traditional way.”

At the end of the day—though I would have forgone trips to Penn Station had she moved to Westchester—I don’t particularly care about this New Jersey business. My issue lies with her leaving the city, period. Because I don’t see her as much as I used to? Because that’s one set of spare keys that would be a real bitch to reclaim from her if I locked myself out? Not really. It’s because it’s starting to show in the tiniest but most profound ways. The sound thing disturbs me the most.

We are bombarded with clatter in this city, from concrete being drilled to an overstuffed backpack with a tourist attached getting stuck in subway doors. Miraculously, what should be white noise is more, well, Technicolor. While we’re not listening, our ears start to differentiate, like identifying birdcalls.

But just because it comes naturally doesn’t mean it’s not a skill. Though my sister still works here everyday, she goes home to a different set of sounds—ignitions starting, cicadas buzzing, leaves scraping in gutters. Her ears are getting dull. Pretty soon she’ll be holding them as buses come to screeching halts, and she’s already unable to differentiate between an oncoming express train and the local 6. I shudder to think of the day someone says “Barney’s sample sale” and my sister thinks of the purple dinosaur. That’ll really give our mother something to cry about.

You know that ticking of a taxi receipt right after you utter those magic words “Right here is good”? That’s one of the better sounds in the world for me, signifying the almost-there collapse into bed after a night out. My sister doesn’t even miss it.

“There are some things more important than taxicabs,” she says.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Last night, we had a barbecue with an actual grill.”

“So?”

“So we saw lightning bugs and these weird little dots in the sky called ‘stars.’”

“I saw Mary-Kate Olsen last night. She ordered a Cobb salad and ate it.”

What my sister doesn’t get is that a mundane urban detail like the sound of a MetroCard with “insufficient fare,” or a large-scale classic like midtown traffic, becomes engrained in New Yorkers. So much so that we’re famous for it. Who among us hasn’t had to tolerate a condescending overnight stay at a friend’s lakeside cabin or beach bungalow? As they show you your room for the night, they say something like “Bet you won’t even be able to sleep without all that street noise.”

Yes, you think, I actually won’t be able to get a wink unless you jam a cinderblock against your station wagon’s horn and A Clockwork Orange is playing full blast in the basement. Concrete being an inanimate substance and all, the streets don’t actually make any noise. This is an un-urban legend. Street noise is relative depending on precisely where you live in the city—and besides, they don’t call them babbling brooks for nothing.

In the highly underrated 1992 film Sneakers, Robert Redford is clubbed over the head by Ben Kingsley’s goons and stuffed in a trunk. He’s then taken to Kingsley’s evil world-taking-over lair blindfolded and later dumped on the side of a highway. In order for Redford to get back to said lair and save the world, he has to describe what he heard from the trunk of the car: the sound of seams in the concrete, going over a bridge, geese on the side of the road.

“Being in New York is not unlike being trapped in the trunk of a car,” I explained to my sister, also a Sneakers fan. “What makes the noise is not what you can hear from the trunk of the car. It’s the harsh world we have to squint to see when that trunk opens.”

I have grown to appreciate my trunk. And it’s important to have people with you that you don’t mind being in such close quarters with—like my sister. Because it’s not the noise that puts us to sleep each night; it’s the being home. For her, that home is now in New Jersey. Even though I miss her living here, I have to admit: She seems to sleep just fine.

Before we hung up, my sister mocked what she referred to as my newfound super-power hearing. She was still standing in the bodega.

“What about the little round smiley guy bouncing around the A.T.M. screen? Can you hear him, too?”

“He doesn’t make any noise, genius.”

“Sure he does,” she laughed at me. “If you listen real close, you’ll hear the sound of him taking away all the money you have left after paying rent.”

“What? Yes.”

“The hollow bleeping sound when you type in your P.I.N., the one that sounds like Speak and Spell. That ain’t no Chase machine.”

“You’re psychotic.”

“No, I just live here.”

“O.K., that was cold.”

Over a year ago, my sister and her husband moved from their rent-controlled apartment on 24th and Lex to a squarish building with a mortgage payment called a “house” in Glen Ridge, N.J. They freakishly wanted more than one bedroom, and a lawn and a car. Even my mother, a Scarsdale-bred suburbanite herself, thinks they’re freaks.

I grew up a Grand Central girl. I’m finding it hard to acclimate to a West Side indoor strip mall of pizza and doughnuts and platform escalators. Just entering Penn Station has the tendency to make me feel like a little kid lost in a mall. To be fair, Grand Central has been known to have that effect on people as well. But I would imagine it’s more like being lost in a museum.

Not blessed with cultural or geographic personalities to defend, suburbanites can become fiercely loyal to and protective of the few things that differentiate theirs from other suburbs. I am no exception. Neither is my mother. I am boggled thinking about the place my sister left. My mother is boggled thinking about where she went.

“We have to accept it … she’s from Jersey now,” she mourns.

“Jesus, Mom—no, she’s not.”

“Yes,” she weeps uncontrollably in her black suit sewn from the cloth of betrayal, “she’s no longer with us.”

“What, so she’s against us?”

“No, I mean that in the traditional way.”

At the end of the day—though I would have forgone trips to Penn Station had she moved to Westchester—I don’t particularly care about this New Jersey business. My issue lies with her leaving the city, period. Because I don’t see her as much as I used to? Because that’s one set of spare keys that would be a real bitch to reclaim from her if I locked myself out? Not really. It’s because it’s starting to show in the tiniest but most profound ways. The sound thing disturbs me the most.

We are bombarded with clatter in this city, from concrete being drilled to an overstuffed backpack with a tourist attached getting stuck in subway doors. Miraculously, what should be white noise is more, well, Technicolor. While we’re not listening, our ears start to differentiate, like identifying birdcalls.

But just because it comes naturally doesn’t mean it’s not a skill. Though my sister still works here everyday, she goes home to a different set of sounds—ignitions starting, cicadas buzzing, leaves scraping in gutters. Her ears are getting dull. Pretty soon she’ll be holding them as buses come to screeching halts, and she’s already unable to differentiate between an oncoming express train and the local 6. I shudder to think of the day someone says “Barney’s sample sale” and my sister thinks of the purple dinosaur. That’ll really give our mother something to cry about.

You know that ticking of a taxi receipt right after you utter those magic words “Right here is good”? That’s one of the better sounds in the world for me, signifying the almost-there collapse into bed after a night out. My sister doesn’t even miss it.

“There are some things more important than taxicabs,” she says.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Last night, we had a barbecue with an actual grill.”

“So?”

“So we saw lightning bugs and these weird little dots in the sky called ‘stars.’”

“I saw Mary-Kate Olsen last night. She ordered a Cobb salad and ate it.”

What my sister doesn’t get is that a mundane urban detail like the sound of a MetroCard with “insufficient fare,” or a large-scale classic like midtown traffic, becomes engrained in New Yorkers. So much so that we’re famous for it. Who among us hasn’t had to tolerate a condescending overnight stay at a friend’s lakeside cabin or beach bungalow? As they show you your room for the night, they say something like “Bet you won’t even be able to sleep without all that street noise.”

Yes, you think, I actually won’t be able to get a wink unless you jam a cinderblock against your station wagon’s horn and A Clockwork Orange is playing full blast in the basement. Concrete being an inanimate substance and all, the streets don’t actually make any noise. This is an un-urban legend. Street noise is relative depending on precisely where you live in the city—and besides, they don’t call them babbling brooks for nothing.

In the highly underrated 1992 film Sneakers, Robert Redford is clubbed over the head by Ben Kingsley’s goons and stuffed in a trunk. He’s then taken to Kingsley’s evil world-taking-over lair blindfolded and later dumped on the side of a highway. In order for Redford to get back to said lair and save the world, he has to describe what he heard from the trunk of the car: the sound of seams in the concrete, going over a bridge, geese on the side of the road.

“Being in New York is not unlike being trapped in the trunk of a car,” I explained to my sister, also a Sneakers fan. “What makes the noise is not what you can hear from the trunk of the car. It’s the harsh world we have to squint to see when that trunk opens.”

I have grown to appreciate my trunk. And it’s important to have people with you that you don’t mind being in such close quarters with—like my sister. Because it’s not the noise that puts us to sleep each night; it’s the being home. For her, that home is now in New Jersey. Even though I miss her living here, I have to admit: She seems to sleep just fine.

Before we hung up, my sister mocked what she referred to as my newfound super-power hearing. She was still standing in the bodega.

“What about the little round smiley guy bouncing around the A.T.M. screen? Can you hear him, too?”

“He doesn’t make any noise, genius.”

“Sure he does,” she laughed at me. “If you listen real close, you’ll hear the sound of him taking away all the money you have left after paying rent.”

A man showed up at the address printed on my first business card and asked the receptionist if anyone had lost a wallet. These days, I barely remember to take business cards with me when I leave the house. Then, I was so thrilled by their shape and texture and significance, I'd carry no less than 10. I offered to pay the man, but he refused; he mumbled something about being in the neighborhood and took the elevator out of sight. Of course, after he left I discovered that he'd already paid himself $17 and a monthly MetroCard.

The important stuff, however-the wallet itself, the credit cards, the all-important driver's license-was all there and untouched. Which might explain why, two years later, when I left my wallet in a cab again, I made none of the usual motions to erase myself. I canceled no accounts, changed no codes and threw away no keys. Blessed with an often-inconvenient mix of faith and practicality, I decided to give my hunch a week before I called Visa. A game of financial roulette, if you will. And on the seventh day, my wallet showed up in my mailbox. And it was good. Even the cash was still inside. (The bad news was that my lost-wallet inflation rate had apparently gone up only $1 in two years.)

This stuff happens to me all the time. It's not that I think I'm particularly lucky; I'm not. On some level, I'm conscious that it's a numbers game. For example, everyone I know who grew up a true New York City kid has been mugged at least twice. Logical. The other night, I thought I felt someone sneaking up on me and I knew my time had come. I just knew it. I felt a hand tug at my arm and turned, wide-eyed, to see a very tall woman who said, "Sorry, but ..." and then tucked the label on my collar back inside my shirt. I laughed, touching where the tag had been, and thanked her. It was then I decided the city is looking out for me. As they say, "Now more than ever." And perhaps that's it-perhaps it's a post-post-post-9/11 humanity that's trickled down to everyday courtesies like not stealing other people's wallets. Perhaps it's simply that niceness has always been New York's best-kept secret, constructed and maintained to keep the tourists out. Sort of like how it really doesn't rain very much in Seattle.

In all likelihood, it's not even as romantic as a shared front, but rather a basic sympathy for our fellow urban dwellers. It's inverted "do unto others" selfishness. I probably wouldn't leap in front of a cross-town bus for anyone only because I wouldn't expect someone to do that for me. But I would expect them to tell me that my fly is undone and take a certain amount of pride in informing others of this myself. In the past five years alone, I have left my wallet in a cab an astonishing-nay, impressive-6.7 times. (The .7 is for all the times I would have gone ID-less into a bar had someone not gotten out of the back seat after me and said, "Forget something?") With the exception of that first $17 idiot's fee, my wallet gets returned to me every time. Every. Single. Time.

Do I think I am jinxing this streak by coming out in the open with it in this manner? That I am courting a trip to the Herald Square D.M.V.? I did consider that. I also figured this would be the ultimate test of my theory that it's not me, not just my luck, but something more organic about the way the city works.

I was absent-mindedly picking at my nails and pondering all of this on the subway platform when a small Korean woman came out from behind the median map barrier and smacked my arm down. "Slun!" She shook her head and held my fingertips in a bunch. "No bite!" People turned to look. Apparently my mother had found a way to morph into this meticulous woman who, in reality, had painted my nails three weeks prior at a local salon. After that, the question was no longer whether the city was looking out for me, but whether it was butting in. I like the barely-there idea of a guardian angel. I could do without the baby-sitting police. When does neighborliness become meddling? It's got to rain in Seattle eventually.

With few exceptions, our actual neighbors who share our addresses are strangers as well. Recently, I came home to a note pasted on my door with duct tape. Apparently I had been throwing my trash bags in the incorrect bucket outside my brownstone, thus leading to some bad bucket overflow. This deviant behavior had to stop. I felt the note was on the brusque side, but perhaps that was just the duct tape talking. Shaking it off, I plucked said note from my door and threw it out in the kitchen. One minute passed before something occurred to me, and then I flung open my kitchen cabinet, reread the Sharpie scrawl and realized: This guy was going through my trash. How else could he know it was me? Yes, I was creeped out. Yes, I now pulp my receipts and double-knot my trash bags. But the thing is, in his own inadvertently selfish way, he meant well. The man didn't want trash outside his house. And his casa is my casa.

In the end, it is rare that our random acts of kindness do not achieve their intended effect. It doesn't take much more than those magic words "Hey, you've got toilet paper stuck to your shoe!" to make me fall in love with this place again. Maybe I'm easy. Maybe it's all about inverted selfishness. That Cuticle Cop was well intentioned, but because I would never do what she did, it pissed me off. I'm just not a good enough person to smack a stranger.

Thus, as I stood there waiting for my train, I felt my understanding and empathy for my fellow New Yorkers swell like a big glowing orb of Care Bears and butterfly kisses. I said the absent-minded professor's prayer of gratitude for every glorious time a wallet-shaped envelope appeared in my mailbox. I smiled at people holding my same subway pole, and they smiled back. Because this is the beauty of strangers: We're all just trying to do our best to help each other out, motivated not by karma or luck but by a natural instinct to aid the greater whole, one stray clothing tag at a time.

Except for the old guy on the corner of 13th and Seventh two nights ago who saw me smoking a cigarette and told me it would kill me. Asshole.